How to sell art online

In the midst of the ever growing artist community, both artists and photographers are finding it more and more difficult to stand out from the crowd.

The market is over saturated, and supply exceeds demand by order of magnitude. There are millions of artworks out there, probably even more, and within this expansive realm of artistry, an artist is simply less likely to bask in limelight.

Also, lets face it, artists today aren’t only competing against their fellow artists, they are also competing against big companies, backed by big money, and at this point, there is little hope in sticking it to the big guys.

FineArtAmerica alone has over 10 million images on their platform. The sheer volume is just daunting to think about.

If you are wondering how can you make your artworks stand in that sea of visuals, let me tell you right now, you can’t. Well, even if you did somehow hit jackpot with their algorithm, with pennies on the dollar, it won’t be worth it.

I am not going to be breaking any good news here, the truth of the matter is, selling art in today’s world is about as hard as it gets.

Now, does that mean you should give up on your dreams? not necessarly, but it does mean that if you decide to pursue your dreams, you should brace yourself for one bumpy ride.

The different ways you can sell art online

There are many ways you can profit from your art, from licensing and commissioning to selling physical reproductions of your artworks, the options are there.

While you can chose to focus on driving sales online and / or offline, in this post we will be focusing on the online side of things.

That doesn’t mean you should focus all of your energy on that. In fact, many artists find a great success in offline marketing, perhaps even more than what can be achieved online.

Also, in this post, we will be primarily discussing the different ways you can sell paintings and art prints. However, you might learn a thing or two even if you are only interested in licensing your art.

As a side note, selling digital art online, either in the form of physical prints, or high quality images, (though you should think twice before attempting the latter!) might prove to be a little bit easier than selling original paintings.

Now, there are multiple options when it comes to establishing an online gallery where you can showcase and / or sell your artworks, and generally I would categorize them as follow:

• Publishing art on social media: Specialized social media platforms include DeviAntart, ArtStation, and Behance. More generic options include Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter and Facebook.
• Selling art on marketplaces: Specialized marketplaces include FineArtAmerica, Society6, Redbubble, and Zazzle. Generic ones include Etsy, Amazon, and Ebay.
• Selling art on your own website: Basic website builders include Wix and Sequarespace, more advanced website building platforms include WordPress and Shopify.

Publishing your artworks on social media might help in getting some awareness but social media platforms aren’t enough by themselves.

You can use them to drive traffic to your accounts on marketplaces or to your own website where people can actually place orders.

For that reason, we will be focusing on the second and third options. We will take a deep dive into each option and highlight some of the pros and cons as we go.

Selling art on marketplaces

Perhaps I have already let my bias against marketplaces slip in the introduction of this post, however, I am not here to make the decision for you, but rather lay out the facts on what you might stand to lose and gain by publishing your artworks on such platforms.

Hopefully that, along with an educated opinion coming from years of experience in the field, will help steer you in the right direction.

So, there is no magic here, you signup for an account with one of the marketplaces mentioned above, you start uploading your artworks, and then choose what products you would like to offer your designs on, these can range from small mugs to entire sets of shower curtains.

Granted, range of products offered might vary from one marketplace to another, but generally there is a big overlap.

Some of the marketplaces will also allow you to list original artworks for sale.

With every product you add, you will be able to see how much the marketplace is going to charge you for printing and fulfillment, and you can add your markup.

Whatever markup you add, will be added to the base price of that particular product, and the sum of that is what the end customer will be paying.

After a customer places an order for one of your artworks, the marketplace will take care of the fulfillment and pay you your profits.

The promise is, after you have published few artworks, you can now sit back and relax, the marketplace takes it from there, after all, they have the traffic and the brand, surely they will get you the customers you so desperately need, orders will come flowing.

Only they won’t.

The sad reality!

As time passes, and you don’t get the orders you were expecting, you will go back and check your listings, you might even start doubting you artistic abilities, or thinking your artworks just aren’t good enough, perhaps your description wasn’t so SEO friendly, surely your markup is too high?

While all of above can explain and justify lack of sales, more often than not, the marketplace’s algorithm is to be blamed.

Even if that was the case, you have no method by which you can pinpoint your bottleneck.

With almost no data, try to identify the reason behind lack of sales and you will be shooting in the dark. Any decision you make in the process will be built on mere speculations, not facts, speculations.

This lack of data always bugged me, sure some marketplaces will give you a peak into some of the more generic data, like how many people viewed or liked your listing, but that’s generally just not enough to build any reasonable plan around.

At some point in the future, we will be publishing a post to discuss how to make data-driven marketing decisions for your art business. However, for the time being, lets compare the pros and cons of selling art on online marketplaces:

Pros:

• Easy to set-up and you can start selling right away.
• Risk-free, you don’t have to invest anything in advance but a little bit of time.
• Free traffic and exposure.

Cons:

• Low barrier to entry means almost unlimited competition.
• Profit margins are as slim as they get. You will be happy if you can squeeze $5 out from each sale.
• You are at the mercy of the marketplace’s algorithm.
• Your customers don’t belong to you, they belong to the marketplace. That means no database of customers, no re-marketing campaigns, and no growth.
• Your name often goes unnoticed, many end customers on these platforms find a cool design and place an order, without caring much about the artist behind it. That means, their next purchase will probably be going to another artist.
• Lack of data makes it difficult to test and improve.
• Risk of protentional issues with the marketplace, things like held payments, un-approved submissions and even delisting .. etc. This is specially true if your artworks are of an exotic nature or you tend to swim close to the edge of copyright infringement.

I don’t want to take the time to compare marketplaces against each other, that could be a subject of a separate post, but really the general idea is that they are quite comparable. They tend to offer more or less the same features and products.

All in all, my opinion on today’s marketplaces can be summed as follow: use them, but don’t expect great results. When you do use them, make sure you aren’t spending a lot of effort and marketing budget to promote your artworks over there.

If you are going to go out of your way to market your artworks, you might as well drive that traffic to your own website, not someone else’s.

It goes without saying that you can’t expect to build any kind of a real and scalable business on any of those marketplaces. It is not impossible per se, but you will find that the odds are stacked against you.

Just like math, and really almost anything in life, the easier it is, the less fruitful it will be.

Building your own website to sell your artworks

We arrive at my personal favorite at last. If you think building your own site is a tough job, I am here to assure you, it isn’t.

Well, let me expand on that last statement; as long as you know your way around a “computer”, building your own website isn’t a daunting task.

As we have categorized them above, website builders can be either basic ones that require zero coding skills, and more advanced ones that can, depending on how much personalized features you are going to need, require some degree of programming knowledge.

My personal advice here would be to go whatever way is faster. You don’t want to be spending your time on Stack Exchange trying to understand how to change the color of your product’s title.

No, you want to be directing your energy towards achieving your goal, building your business, marketing … etc, not learning HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and god knows what other programing language you will need to learn to build the perfect website.

I can’t stress this point enough, don’t go down the rabbit hole trying to learn the technicalities. Don’t be a perfectionist, your sales won’t double if you change your site logo, or finally figure out how to add that awesome font, or do a thousand more tiny optimizations.

As long as the site looks good and is functional, you are good to go. Now is the time to stop working on the site and go figure out how to get it in front of potential clients.

The best website builders

Lets take a closer look into each of the website builders we have already mentioned:

• Wix: A paid service that lets you to build a website with few button clicks and a bit of dragging and dropping. It offers a handful of features out of the box, and an extensive marketplace of plugins that add extra features. It was primarily used for building information websites and blogs, but packs some nice e-commerce capabilities as well.
• Squarespace: A direct competitor to Wix, offers more or less the same experience.
• Shopify: A full blown e-commerce solution. It offers an extensive set of features and is the direct and fastest way to build an e-commerce site nowadays. Its a proprietary platform that also includes hosting.
• WordPress: The most popular website building platform. Its free and open source (although there exists a paid option that includes hosting), and you will have to set it up yourself. You have to find a proper hosting company to host your website, and navigate your way without direct support.

Whichever platform you choose, Youtube is your friend. There exist a wide range of good tutorials that will take teach you how to build your website in a couple of hours.

Of all the above, Shopify is a good choice if you want to get started as soon as possible, WordPress would be the perfect choice if you want a free option and don’t mind the little bit of extra work you will have to put in to setup your website.

I will add that, if you are planning to use any of the POD services like Printify, Printful, and Prodigi, you should know that they tend to integrate better with Shopify. Prodigi for example has dropped support for WordPress altogether.

So if you have a specific service in mind, definitely check their website to see what platforms they have ready-to-go integrations for.

Website features that artists need

Of curse, none of the above platforms were built with artists in mind. Whatever platform you decide to go with, you will soon realize that some really important features needed for selling artworks and prints are missing.

As an artist, you will need a specific set of features designed to help you sell your artworks. A generic website builder is just not going to cut it.

The good news is that there exists third party services that can be integrated to your website to seamlessly add some of those features.

One of which is Olasy’s ArtSpaces (yup! that’s us), its a widget that can be integrated with just about any website, and allows your customers to visualize your artworks in a space, on their own walls, and in Augmented Reality in accurate dimensions.

You can see the widget in action in this demo site. Also, take a look at the ArtSpaces journey.

Now lets sum up the pros and cons of building your own website to sell your art online.

Pros

• You have full control over your designs and prices.
• You have full control of your traffic and data. You can always use Google Analytics to take a deep dive into your customers’ behavior and start making educated decisions.
• You can run marketing campaigns on Adwords or other social media platforms and drive traffic to your website.
• Artists that have their own websites appear to be more professional and authentic.
• Your artworks aren’t buried deep with another million or so artworks.
• You can utilize SEO and other social media to drive free traffic to your website.

Cons

• Relatively less easier than signing up for an account on a marketplace.
• Depending on what platform you choose, you will have to invest money or relatively more effort to set up your website.
• You might need to buy premium plugins or integrate with 3rd part services to get all the features you need.

The perfect recipe for selling art online

All in all, the perfect recipe for selling artworks online is a combination of a personal website, a good POD service, specialized integrations to add missing features that artists need, heavy marketing, and perhaps some good luck.